[Sca-cooks] Nicole Crossley-Holland

[Johnna Holloway]

That's what I mean about mixed opinion. PPC thought it was ok in their 
original
review. I knew that MEM/Elaina was displeased with it from her remarks 
at SCA Cooks.

I jumped through the various hoops this am and read all the academic 
reviews of the book that
I can access online. I am not driving nto Ann Arbor in the snow to see
the one French review that I turned up. Sorry.

The Medium Aevum review that appeared volume 67, issue 1 in 1998 by P.J.P.
Goldberg (whose affliation was given as York.)wrote that the work:
"by focusing on the food provisioning and culinary sections of this much 
more substantial work, Nicole Crossley-Holland provides little 
discussion of its overall purpose. Instead her concern appears to be to 
write on food history using the Menagier as her primary source. As such 
the present reviewer is hardly qualified to comment, beyond expressing 
confusion as to the precise purpose or audience for such a study. At 
times Crossley-Holland seems only to be describing the text. .....This 
is not to imply that there is little of value in this study. There are 
numbers of observations that non-specialist food historians would find 
interesting, e.g. the discussion of the use of colour (pp. 179-go), and 
the general reader, for whom this book is perhaps intended, would find 
much more. Finally, Crossley-Holland's identification of the Md'nagier 
with Guy de Montigny is generally convincing and makes sense of some of 
the personal references contained within the text."

The Economic History Review, February 1998, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 192-221
"In a fine piece of detective work she assemblies various fragments to 
revel him as Guy de Montigny, a cultured knight once
in the service of the duke of Berry."

Christopher Dyer in his review that appeared in
History, April 1998, vol. 83, no. 270, pp. 295-313(19)
Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, UK and Boston, USA
"Nicole Crossley-Holland's scholarly achievement  is to identify the author
as Guy de Montigny, a knight in the service of the duk of Berry, through
skillful detective work in many archives picking up references in the 
treatise to people
and places with which the author was familiar."

There is one more review that I would like to see but I don't have
access to it--- Martha Cralin reviewed it for The Ricardian: Journal
of the Richard III Society Vol. XI, no. 143 December 1998.
Anyone subscribe to that?

I will mention that it is one of the few things out there on 14th 
century French dining that is
available and one can always check the footnotes for all the reasoning 
behind the assertions.

Lastly, if  I were an editor I would expect that one might mention it 
especially
since the article is for a British publication and the book is in print 
and by the University of
Wales Press at Cardiff.

Anyway this is why I recommended that she read it for her article.

Johnnae llyn Lewis

Mary Morman wrote:

> I don't know about "mixed opinions" as Johnna says, I'd say that 
> Nicole Crossley-Holland's Living and Dining in Medieval Paris is just 
> downright AWFUL.  The woman's scholarship on her search for the "real" 
> identity of Le Menagier is so garbled that I refuse to have anything 
> to do with any other research or opinions she presents.  She has an 
> idee fixee about Le Menagier and goes through all sorts of 
> peregrinations of backwards logic to prove that what she wants to be 
> true is indeed true.  Bad book. Don't go near it.
>
> Elaina
>
>
>
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